Many doctors believe that using apps that keep track of your health will help cut down on doctor visits, a new infographic suggests.

According to data revealed by Float Mobile Learning, 40% of doctors believe that using mobile health technologies such as apps that monitor fitness and eating habits can reduce the number of office visits needed by patients. About 88% of doctors are in full support of patients monitoring their health at home, especially when it comes to watching weight, blood sugar and vital signs, and many believe consumers should take advantage of the apps currently on the market to help along the process.

“With the forthcoming changes to the U.S. healthcare system, there will be an increased focus on wellness programs and preventative medicine,” Chad Udell, managing director of Float Mobile Learning, told Mashable. “Mobile health offers a tremendous opportunity for people to become more involved in their own health and wellness.”

It’s no secret that the mobile health industry is growing. There are more than 10,000 medical and healthcare apps available for download in the Apple App Store, making it the third-fastest growing app category among iPhone and Android users.

Doctors are also getting in on the trend, as 80% said they use smartphones and medical apps.
Physicians are also 250% more likely to own a tablet than other consumers.

You built an app, it’s great, but still, there’s something missing. You’re not getting the userengagement you had hoped for. The good news is, you don’t need to spend a whole lot of time and money trying to boost your numbers, all you need to do is take your existing app and test out a few design changes. A lot of the time it’s small tweaks in design that can really transform your app and boost user engagement. Before you start overhauling the design and making plans to build the next big thing, remember to keep it simple. Don’t waste a lot of time tweaking too many pieces at once. Not only will it be a nightmare to measure which changes have proved successful, it will take too long — too long to design, too long to implement, and too long to test. Test quicker, faster, smaller things and you can make better design decisions.

Case in point, here’s what happened at Flud. When we launched Flud 2.0 in December 2011, everything seemed great from the outside. People were downloading the app, reading articles and adding sources, but we were expecting more in app engagement as well as more engagement with the Flud Stream and Flud 2.0’s most important social feature — the Activity Stream. Before our launch, we set a benchmark. We wanted x number of users to open the app y number of times, read z number of articles and influence i number of users. When we didn’t reach that benchmark we asked ourselves what was wrong — why weren’t we getting engagement we wanted? Seguir leyendo “FLUD: How Two Small Design Changes Tripled User Engagement”→